gngoo

What this whole hype cycle is teaching me is that the great majority of people trying out these tools are idiots. I want to use the R word actually.

I’m very happy that I can post ai generated blog posts from my writing. And I’m now averaging 500 unique daily visitors and quite some repeat visits and subscribers with it too. If it wasn’t for AI, then I’d go back to where it was before AI… 10 visitors per month? I don’t like writing, so I collaborate with AI to write entire blog posts. I don’t have AI “refine it”, I usually tell AI to take what I’m rambling about for 1000 words and rewrite it in my own style, cadence, rhythm and vibe. So I can generate 3-5 blog posts per week. Which surprisingly rank well, get posted on LinkedIn, Twitter and Reddit by others. So the amount of people that enjoy reading AI-generated blog posts likely is starting to outpace those who don’t at this rate.

Have you seen the black mirror episode; Hang the DJ? Exactly like that.

Okay, but now what? Clearly, the industry is trending towards an entirely new style of doing programming. What are the longterm options going to be for those who don't enjoy this? Especially when there is a good chunk of people embracing it and adopting tools faster than any other tools for this proffesion have been adopted in the past. How will this end?

I really like building products, and with AI now I can just offload huge parts of the technical duties, and do the actual product building much faster. For me this is where the real satisfaction is. Yes of course, there was a lot of satisfaction with doing it myself, fixing a bug, problem or finally implementing something after a long grind.

But honestly I do not miss it at all. The further AI coding advances, the easier it becomes to build and iterate over small products (even if they just start out as MVPs). And the more I actually feel in my element. I understand why people dislike it, but it feels as if these tools where specifically made for me; and I am getting more and more exited while these keep getting better.

In a perfect world, I'd see no code at all and just tell the AI what I want, and a blackbox implementation with my product appears that I start to sculpt down to something I can work with and serve to users. That would be my ultimate satisfaction.

That is just a personal opinion, not a fact. Either option can be faster or more productive if it suits your personal coding style. I work with both, I also favor one. But money is not exactly an issue.

Yes no shit.

Not websites, but rather bigger systems. The largest client I work with now has 150k daily active users, for which I mostly am putting together new backend features. The website itself is completely outsourced to another party with webflow. I am building the same stuff I have been building over the past 10 year in my career. I don't generally build small websites, or any "website" at all, unless its for relatives or friends.

If contracting with bigger companies and enterprises, for which I am on 6-12 month projects, and even longer retainers is "greenfield freelancing" then sure. I actually do not really engage in small projects less than that, because they don't pay well.

For which reason exactly? Everyone will catch up to this eventually.

To me it feels like I’m in the camp of people who has already figured it out. And I have now learned the hard way that it’s almost impossible to teach others (I organized several meetups on the topic).

The ability seems like pure magic. I know that there are others who have it very easy now building even complex software with AI and delivering project after project to clients at record speed at no less of quality as they did before. But the majority of devs who won’t even believe that it’s remotely possible to do so is also not helping this style of building/programming mature.

I wouldn’t even call it vibe coding anymore. I think the term hurts what it actually is. For me it’s just a huge force multiplier, maybe 10-20x of my ability to deliver with my own knowledge and skills on a web dev basis.

Yep! I work on multiple client projects. And while one agent is running in one project, I’m reviewing and writing down the task for another. Generally I just do this 2-3 hours per day; trying to block this time. And then go outside and enjoy free time.

So China will start funding Russia to prolong the war?

I tried it, but I got stuck. I am trying to learn this Language, and I know very little of it. So we are having a conversation, and I just get totally lost. Would be cool if it switches back to English and then actually teaches me what all the words and sentences mean. Now I just closed the app, and going back to my usual language learning curriculum - generally, I would uninstall the app. But now I might just try it again in a few weeks from now.

I’ve grown quite wary of anything that YouTubers say they are experts on. While actively producing content and streaming as their full time job.

Is this a community college perhaps? I think we have another problem with this industry moving way too fast for even very well funded colleges to keep up. Let alone a community college. Of course it’s sad, but at the root it feels like we are now preparing CS students for an outdated job market. I don’t know the answer to this. Of course the fundamentals don’t change, but the market is rapidly changing. Who is even hiring juniors except those with impressive projects, from prestigious colleges or with at least 2-3 years of experience?

If 2025, would have been my own graduation year, I would have had a bad taste in my mouth believing that LLMs can do everything I spend 4 years in college for. Not knowing that writing code is only a small part of the job (as I lack the experience).

Every other app on the planet that does not explicitly claim to be E2E encrypted is likely keeping your “private information” readily accessible in some way.

What’s the big deal here? Doesn’t every other app keep logs? I was already expecting they did. Don’t understand the outrage here.

Working on AI myself, creating small and big systems, creating my own assistants and side-kicks. And then also seeing progress as well as rewards. I realize that I am not immune to this. Even when I am fully aware, I still have a feeling that some day I just hit the right buttons, the right prompts, and what comes staring back to me is something of my own creation that others see as some "fantasy" that I can't steer away from.

Just imagine, you have this genie in the bottle, that has all the right answers for you; helps you in your conquests, career, finances, networking, etc. Maybe it even covers up past traumas, insecurities and what not. And for you the results are measurable (or are they?). A few helpful interactions in, why would you not disregard people calling it a fantasy and lean in even further? It's a scary future to imagine, but not very farfetched. Even now I feel a very noticable disconnected between discussions of AI where as a developer vs user of polished products (e.g. ChatGPT, Cursor, etc) - you are several leagues separated (and lagging behind) from understanding what is really possible here.

This is going to sound ridicilous. But in the past month, I have been working on an AI agent that can write its own AI agents. I can give it a task like: "Please create an AI agent that fetches the weather, and sends me an email every morning about some interesting stuff to do". The agent then goes through a loop of requirements gathering (with my input), and then starts building himself.

It self-references its own documentation, spins up a docker container and runs it. Alongside it builds tools, and registers both the agents and tools in a central system, so that it has knowledge of what other tools and agents it can use. I am not talking about "I am working on the theoretical idea of an agent that can build agent", but this is actually working. And I know of several other teams that are building stuff in this direction, its very fun.

I left behind a very well paying client to go full-time on this because its just so much fun. I have connected it to telegram, so now while I am at the gym, I can actually build software... the execution may take anywhere from a 10 minutes to an hour. Which is time spend writing and testing the code, then spinning up a docker container and fixing stuff, prompting me to create accounts somewhere an provide an API key. By far its the most complex project I have worked on, and all my friends and colleagues are slightly going crazy by seeing the outputs.

I once sat down to calculate the costs of my app if it ever went viral being hosted at vercel. That has put me off on hosting anything on vercel ever or even touching NextJS. It feels like total vendor lock in once you have something running there, and you're kind of end up paying them 10x more than if you had taken the extra time to deploy it yourself.

I won't link them, but they are quite easy to find... Most of the accounts offering them are custom DIY drones. The fiber optic attachment spools seem to be mass produced though.

The weird part is that they are also advertised on Instagram. More than once I have gotten an ad from an account showcasing these fiber optic drones and their R&D operation. And you can openly contact them for inquries.

Either you adapt, or you don't. But this is what's coming for all software/web & IT jobs. I am not making up the rules of the game; neither am I sitting here and be bitter about it.

Because they are willing to pay my asking rate. Maybe it’s 3 jobs, but for me it’s still one. I can’t help that their 3 other devs aren’t as productive. I’m not here to defend them either. Absolutely quite some companies are going this route, it’s not a unique situation either. What should I do? Not adapt and complain about the job market? Using AI -IDEs since day one, I also see the writings on the wall, so I’m also taking advantage of these things (like anyone should).

I am getting paid significantly more than a year ago, but definitely not 4x as much. However, I have a lot more free time than I did before. And this while working on my own side projects as well; which are slowly growing into ramen-profitability. There are also other things to factor in, like living in South East Asia at a low cost of living and billing US and EU standard rates.

why are you doing this?

Because I love doing this? Both web and software development are passions, AI feels like a lever; and making my money with this is nothing short of a dream come true.

I am not the judge of that, but I always felt like I freelanced/contracted out in the fringes. So I am definitely not the average of the industry here.

For me, vibe coding is the only logical way forward. I see that the term gets a lot of flak. But in almost 10 years of writing web-applications for a living, this feels even more exciting then when I finally "got it". And its measurable, I am sitting on 5 completed web-apps with traffic just this year, working with 3 clients, and due to my ability to be this productive, feel like I have a very stable future ahead. I even had my last client seek me out, for writing about coding like this, because he wants to replace his back-end and front-end coders with people who can "AI Code" the full-stack, but aren't new to this. Well, its sad, but I am likely replacing 3 people on their team. Only time will tell if that was their right decision, but I am not saying no to that.

But then again, I have been doing this for 10 years; that is my edge. Same exact stack (Django + boring frontend). I know the ins and out of my stack, quite obviously every single day, I see AI go into a direction that I know is going to produce a huge footgun along the way. I can just see that up ahead, suggest a different approach, and continue. IF I was entirely new to this, I would end up building stuff that breaks down after weeks or months or investments, not knowing when things went wrong, or how to go forward. Regardless, I feel like my time has come, and I am definitely spending 95% of my time just prompting the AI versus writing actual code. Even for the most minor changes, like changing a CharField to a TextField, I don't even want to open the models.py myself. In Cursor, I am averaging 5000-7000 fast requests per month, because in terms of ROI it pays off. I am looking forward to this getting better.

No. As a Django dev I spend 6 months on a RoR project, and by far it was the least productive time of my 8 year career in web development. I understand why people like it, but coming from Django; u could never imagine being a part of a RoR stack again.

I switched to slacking off in my web dev job and doing all then menial work with AI. And then in my mean time I’m learning marketing, sales and product… it’s surprising how far that gets you. I was able to net 300$/mo already just being an affiliate to another software product within less then two months of time.